


forte e piano

by spacemagic



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Fluff, Romance, Shepard can't write, Smut, renegade femshep, short piece, sorryliara.txt, space lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 02:19:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4417271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemagic/pseuds/spacemagic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Commander Shepard tends to bludgeon her way through most problems with a loaded gun and a straight face. Mercenary gangs, hostage situations, intergalactic diplomacy - it actually works, most of the time. Writing delicate prose/poetry to an asari lover, however, is definitely not covered under her skillset.</p>
<p>Shepard thinks about Liara, her softness, her distance, her oddly clinical approach to the rest of the world, their supposed complete incompatibility, and her ability to see how beautiful the world is. A sweet and slightly smutty collection of thoughts about their relationship as Shepard struggles to wax lyrical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forte e piano

She was soft, like the breeze as it stripped the petals off Thessian wildflowers –

A pause. Backspace, backspace, backspace.

She plucked the colours out of the overgrown fields, abandoned, caught up in brambles, out of snarling thorns she found clutches of ripe berries, azure and gold, cool to touch and taste, and last season’s violet blossom still lingering, still sweet scented, in the undergrowth. She unearthed old memories that were thought lost, little whispers that had forgotten to echo. She took the secrets of the earth and set them free in the sky -

Jesus wept, did she really just write that?

Shepard never thought herself as much of a writer. The only thing she could make dance was a reliable firearm. She might talk and drink to otherwise – she’s Commander fucking Shepard, she could do anything in the world she wanted, thank you very much. But honestly? She was only good at a few things. Shoot and run. Sometimes duck. Press buttons. Disconnect the comm on the tetchy wiseass Turian Councillor. She was _damn_ good at that last one. And, really – fine with the shortness of the resume. She wasn’t planning on switching professions any time soon. Certainly not for clumsy rhymes or tangled prose.

_Poetry_ was definitely not something they paid her for. People usually thought she was a hard woman – to fight, to beat, to love (or so she thought). Shepard was content with that reputation – definitely no poetry there. Could tell some sappy story about sleeping in slimy old dumpsters through radiation storms and streets painted red and white with flashbombs and fire – no poetry there, either. Didn’t – nobody asked her, anyway. She was a simple creature, underneath all the COMMANDER SHEPARD bluster: she liked to shoot and she liked to fly and she liked to win. And she made the terrible decisions nobody else wanted to make. That’s all there was, really. They promoted her for it, so hell, she wasn’t exactly complaining. Her approach to life was like, say, a wayward asteroid: hurtle through space as fast as you can, as hard as you can, without stopping for anything.

That was before she had met the ellipsis, the parenthesis, and the question mark formally referred to as Dr. T’Soni, that had punctuated her life for the past three years – that had made her pause.

Liara was _soft_. Everything about her was: her round, gentle hips (her fingernails could dig into them, sink into them, hell, she could start up a formal archaeological expedition of the soft little moans Liara let loose as she carefully surveyed the scattering of freckles, bumps, and scars with her little finger), her soft, fleshy thighs (where she’d plant little kisses on the insides, where the shades of blue turned gentler, lighter, as her lips brushed up along her thighs, her tongue slid closer to her pretty blue cunt), and the little bump of her stomach (Liara always whined about it, so Shepard _always_ made sure to touch and nibble every inch of her skin there, to trace fingertips from her collarbones to her belly before they slipped down her underwear). Perhaps the only thing that was hard about her were her nipples as teeth sunk into her soft, full breasts, or maybe her hoarse, astonished little gasp – ‘by the _goddess_ ,’ – when her fingers climbed up inside of her –

Shepard was convinced that woman was made of sheer _poetry_ and nothing else. Whether a couplet of delicately metered iambic flowers, or overgrown pages of epic verse, all windswept azure seas and shimmering golden suns – Liara T’Soni, god, she _did_ art.

‘I _do_ art?’ Shepard could picture it, frame the moment. Auction it for a hundred thousand creds. The silk sheets would be curled up over her body, laid out on the crunched up bedspread, her chin cupped in a lazy hand. Dr. T’Soni, _post-coitus_. The intonation: curious. _Do?_ A messy laugh, mixed up with a cough, probably a bit awkward. Utterly spellbinding. She’d then insist – really, she _was_ flattered, eloquence of the statement – to “do”art, really, Shepard? – aside, but she didn't think she deserved to be placed up on a pedestal –

‘This isn’t a ‘paint me like one of your French ladies’ thing, Liara,’ Shepard would interrupt, half-snort, ignoring that, Liara was indeed, picture perfect, positioned like one of those French ladies. ‘You’re not my Helen of Troy. You’re so much more than that.’ And then she’d bite her tongue before she said anything dumber, damn it.

Liara would then find Shepard’s insistent human cultural references she didn’t quite understand very charming. Quaint. But she _wouldn’t_ probe. Question. Not when Shepard looked so... uncomfortable with the discussion. She’d drop the subject with a gentle smile. Thank god for that. To _do_ art – not just _be_ art – she wouldn’t get it. Not just be the subject, a muse, trapped within a frame, the paint _ed_ lady, but to live and breathe, to paint, to actively do and search and live and _enjoy_. To bring some depth and light into this dim little corner of the galaxy. No, it was better Liara didn't know about this until it was complete.

I mean – and really, who was Shepard kidding, she was trying to justify this display of slushy garbage as much to herself – Liara wasn’t exactly a delicate _artiste_ , if her clunky piano-key-stabbing back on the Citadel was anything to go by. It was more… her earnest fascination, at first, with Shepard, the enigma, the scientific marvel, a breathing case study. She’d set to work immediately: observing remotely, recording the frequency of her wry smirks and raised eyebrows and the times Shepard would bluntly ask: ‘Why the hell are you staring at me, Liara?’ – she’d stutter and stammer and flutter, dodging the question like a bullet. Liara T’Soni, and her freakishly big, blue eyes, were not subtle.

Yet she didn’t ask those difficult, intimate questions like anyone else would. None of those whys and whos and what-the-hells that Shepard batted off like flies before she pulled rank on their ass. On the contrary, T’Soni seemed resolutely determined to figure it out alone, to uncover the “enigma of Shepard” by tracking the differences between the odd creases in her face when she was pleased and disgruntled, and then making a formal academic paper. Somewhere in the process of avoidance, denial, reluctant disagreement – ‘I suppose it was necessary,’ was the phrase she used, god it was annoying, and she’d say it so quietly, softly, like Shepard just killed a puppy rather than a bunch of angry mercs – and awkward silences, they ended up fucking each other.

It was the weirdest way of saying ‘I love you’ ever.

She was involved, but she wouldn’t _get_ involved.

That distance, that insistence that she’d be a pace apart, tear herself from her exotic lover to file paperwork. That she’d spend two years scouring the galaxy for her half-exploded corpse, preserving, cultivating every scrap of evidence that she could, and then spending the next two months coldly refusing to contact her – it was stupid. Mildly creepy. Irrational.

It was _exactly_ the sort of thing Shepard would do in her position.

Hell, it didn’t make any sense. They were _complete_ opposites – Liara was _so_ soft. Pretty. Quiet. Alluring. Solitary – complete in and of herself, a singularity, containing a gravitas, a pull, a completion in how _much_ there was to her. And Shepard was… well, herself. Hard. Bit of a nutcase. ‘Slightly Unhinged’.

But when Shepard was aggressively evasive it was because she was Shepard and people respected that she was Shepard. Whereas Liara was evasive and distant, a step away, because – well, the value she placed on other people, soldiers and civilians, their transient lives, their tumble-weed thoughts, and their hurt feelings, seemed to be, from what Shepard had witnessed, far greater than the value she placed on herself…

…like what she’d unearthed, uncovered, stolen kisses on bare skin, Observations by Starlight from Shepard’s Cabin Log #1.5 2k183, re-mapping constellations onto new co-ordinates, fingers tracing patterns along her back, shifting and trembling in the cold, filtered air, was so fragile, so breakable, so impermanent – in passing – a selection of isolated moments – Liara understood that the world was fragile, close to shattering, with the wrong touch, the wrong feeling, she’d tamper with her results, she’d ruin what she’d so carefully uncovered, she’d find the mangled corpse of her lover in the remains of the Normandy SR-1, and that was it, gone –

‘She took the secrets of the earth and set them free in the sky.’

It wasn’t much of a poem, really – too many complete sentences. A bit too intelligible. Could be softer. It was difficult – she was trying to articulate that sense of value, of art, of genuine beauty, of her habit of picking apart a bruised old battlefield's last wildflowers and categorising them by their colour, which she seemed to bring to everything – whilst not actually saying that much in a sentence. Maybe she should write a short story instead – no, that’s too much like hard work, and she’d get side-tracked in some side-plot involving gunning down a thresher maw –

Thank god they didn’t pay her for this.

Shepard deleted the file ‘sorry liara.txt’ from the datapad. The Shadow Broker would probably sift through her recently removed documents anyway as a matter of habit. Probably should have deleted all the text first though. Damn it. Nothing she could do about that now.

**Author's Note:**

> I finished a playthrough with a renegade!femshep recently, and honestly, it's amusing how completely at odds she appears to be with Liara. The romance scenes didn't reflect how they dealt with that incongruence in most cases. 
> 
> The exception, for me, is the piano-playing scene in the Citadel DLC (which is where the title comes from, forte/piano are opposites in sheet music, even if forte translates as strong/loud rather than hard). Shepard constantly has to breach the distance Liara creates between her and others. So I wrote something trying to cover that dynamic.
> 
> I hope it's to people's tastes! Comments/crit are welcomed with open arms (goes without saying, but yeah).


End file.
